Teachers Explain The Difference Between 1997 And 2017 Students (r/AskReddit)

teachers of reddit what's the difference between 1997 2007 and 2017 students 97 quit passing notes 0-7 quit texting 17 are you seriously watching netflix right now i teach english as a rural high school the biggest issue for 2017 students is that they have almost zero self-confidence i don't know if this is a product of culture or if this is just a fluke with my students however they are unwilling to try anything challenging or new without an extreme amount of one-on-one guidance and that's very difficult to give in a classroom of 30. not exactly what you're looking for but i have a story to share my father graduated high school in the mid 60s after graduation he and a few friends rented a sailboat and went from the coral inner coast to the bahamas young free healthy men spent a few days sailing a week on the beach and sailed home when i graduated shortly after 9 over 11 i tried to repeat this trip with a few of my friends no one would rent their sailboat to a couple 18 year olds i guess social trust has changed we finally find one through a friend of my father and set sail for the bahamas two days in and we see a helicopter then a coast guard vessel then we are boarded by us government guys with guns who say all right boys what is it today you moving guns or drugs after searching the boat for hours and it's a tiny boat and finding nothing we are let go but instructed to turn around and sail home under threat of arrest if we continued south yeah so i guess things have changed a bit my dad taught middle school from 1968 to 2004 when he retired i asked him what changes he saw in students from the beginning of his teaching career to the end he answered the kids never changed a teenager is always a teenager the parents however changed dramatically they used to respect teachers and side with us in disciplinary matters but now they think their kids are perfect and we are wrong glad i'm getting out before it gets worse 1997 colorful hair and piercings 2007 no colorful hair lots of tattoos 2017 colorful hair and tattoos i teach in college oh the other difference was 1997 no one talked about being gay 2007 students came out to me privately in my office 2017 students talk about being gay in class i was a student in 1997 at the school i now teach at so i can answer this one 2017 students are infinitely more polite harder working and more intelligent than my cohort ever was they are much less likely to smoke they don't drink the idea on the playing field at lunch time and they don't sell each other shitty weed in industrial quantities i gather they sell each other excellent quality weed in very small quantities instead it's a big secondary school on a fairly deprived estate so these aren't exactly kids who go to etiquette classes after school but i literally can't open a door by myself because some 16 year old with mutton chops will spring out to open it for me if i'd done that when i was at school it would have been instant social death everybody is going tech so i'll go with cultural all teams rebel they all think they have it right and the grown-ups have it wrong but they show it differently in 97 the prevailing word was anger i hate the way things are kids were harsher meaner being nasty was the way to show you're cool i saw a lot of kids get their kicks out of breaking the santa illusion for grade schoolers for example 17 kids are much nicer to each other think of the music of the time smashing pumpkins nin and the like in spite or my rage i'm still just a rat in a cage in zero seven the word was mope kids were softening up being nicer to each other but also getting more into the sadness is beautiful kind of thing they weren't angry at the adults so much as they just wanted them to go away and hide into their hoodies leave me alone to my solitude consider the way emo was huge at this time in 17 kids are much nicer to each other they are kind to young kids and friendlier in general but there's this strange undercurrent of competition to be the most good person which leads to the weird yes mayonnaise is a gender if that's how you identify a kind of thing in 17 kids want to explain to the grown-ups how they're all bigots they also handle failure far worse than previous generations 17 kids try harder and genuinely want to succeed in ways that the 97 kids didn't in 97 you were cool if you avoided working hard and didn't care if you failed but 97 kids also recovered from adversity faster they didn't bruise as easily they were harder meaner kids but also didn't quit as easily and thrived on constructive criticism now there's bits of each of these personality types in every year there were nice kids who were also soft in 97 and there are no pemo types now but the prevailing culture shifted these ways going to sound like an old man here but when i was in high school in 97 we had a system where various teachers aides would photocopy all of the notes answer keys homeworks etc and put into an unused locker my whole class even the future valedictorian use that locker i'd imagine cheating efforts have advanced since then i wasn't old enough to teach yet in 1997. i was four years out of high school young and naive in 2007 students were semi-glued to their phones but the technology to integrate them into the classroom twitter accounts facebook snapchat etc wasn't there not was it encouraged in any way through administration there was still a phones away rule for the most part the students in my tech courses at the college i was working were older either getting re-certified new degrees or simply enhancing their current skills with newer ones i would put most of the ages in the late 20s to mid 30s in 2017 i have young students right out of high school it's rare now that i have an older student most of these students come in with at least a basic knowledge of technology slash hardware software but more often than not they are even more advanced than that it's interesting how the tech group got so much younger and more skilled while the older group i don't know do they not move forward anymore are they switching to different careers graduated hs in 93 taught middle school i noticed a definite change regarding phone slash social media went through the whole adjustment of no one having a phone to trying to enforce rules about phones to just dealing with them from a teacher's perspective i'd like to smash the [ __ ] out of their phones when they're using them in class kids think they are sneaky some are really not anyway went from kids being dicks about phones to now being cool and better about being polite about it definitely more parental involvement now as opposed to 10 years ago i feel students today want to be told exactly what to do and won't risk trying to figure it out on their own my husband just hired two assistants who are 22 and 23 in his job he says they are constantly needing guidance for stuff they should be able to figure out on their own it's just interesting that he is seeing it as well and has nothing to do with education students today are more aware of social issues most kids in 1997 weren't thinking about equality and immigration or anything political now kids are much more informed and mostly more tolerant kids today do not seem to care about being outside as much probably bc the media overdose has everyone convinced there's a pervert or murderer behind ever bush i find myself spending ridiculous amounts of time on my phone looking at reddit and other digital entertainment it is strange to realize how it feels like a waste of time in 1997 this was not a problem so it is not just changing students it is a change in all of us teaching has certainly become a lot cooler as far as the technology goes not so much with the administrative interference i see a lot of people in this thread mentioning how high schoolers these days aren't as creative or don't take risks as often or can't figure stuff out on their own i'm a high school senior and i can only speak from my perspective but for me i'm hesitant to take risks because the consequences are so great let's say that i wanted to take a challenging ib class and try to push myself a little harder if i fail or get a poor grade that drags down my gpa and can seriously mess up my options for the future if college admission see a three zero and a three two from applicants from the same background they'll probably take the three two so bam because you took a risk you can't get into the college you wanted to colleges don't see that you challenged yourself and took a risk and learned from your failure they see the failure itself and dismiss you for it that means it one of you have to be perfect and don't mess this up or else is one that i see all over so much is expected of me that it's hard to take risk and deal with failure because not only do you have yourself to beat up over it but everyone around you also berates you for it it's hard to take risks when it seems like your entire self-worth and future is at stake standard disclaimer i was not in school before the 2000s this is my experience as a student and member of the younger generation 97 little regard to terrorism zero seven remember nine over eleven seventeen can you explain what nine over eleven was i wasn't born yet as a history teacher it's been interesting and difficult trying to instill the gravity of events to people who weren't even born at the time i imagine it was a similarly strange scenario for teachers who taught during the attack on pearl harbor or the assassination of jfk strange to have major life events turn to just another historical story for kids within a few short years at the same time it gives me motivation to keep teaching with the same passion as if the events just happened so kids continue to understand its importance graduated hs in 1995 taught middle slash high school in 2007 and am teaching college in 2017 i'd argue the biggest difference is technology in the 90s pages were all the rage in the internet was relatively new to the masses and something you did sitting down at a computer and excruciatingly slow so as a teenager we spent a lot of time hanging out with each other one-on-one with an absence of technology sometimes we'd father to play video games but multiplayer was limited to a local network or split screen most commonly we'd just take turns but i'd argue technology was not something we spent a lot of time on but rather dabbled with 2007 was at the beginning of the smartphone revolution many maybe most students at this point have cell phones social media youtube were coming of age and that has changed students a lot in my opinion i used to get annoyed borderline angry when i saw a group of people at dinner all on their phones 2017 social media is rampant a lot of studies have correlated increasing usage of social media with social disconnectedness and even depression it is as if the creation of virtual social circles has actually created less personal social cohesion so it's important to put your phone down and go just hang out more rather than less you'll hear back in my day kids fill in the blank and it's for the most part horse [ __ ] kids are kids teens are teens some are put together some have huge obstacles to overcome progress that has been made it seems to me that young people are much more tolerant of other people's sexual orientation culture and religion compared when i was a kid i don't know anyone from my 700 plus high school that was out of the closet or identified as anything other than christian publicly i never thought i would see gay marriage happen or part legalized for that matter and now the focus on transgender issues is at society's forefront these are great steps that cannot be overlooked and discounted so back in my day kids played outside and with each other teaching kids unhealthy social relationships but people that weren't the norm were silenced these rascals today spend too much god damn time on their phones but live in a more accepting society oh yeah and have dank memes since i'm an old fart who has been teaching during all of these years i will give my impression the main difference i see is an attention span and impulsivity the 2017s cannot focus on only one thing if i'm talking they will be doing 10 other things they have the attention span of an at and can't sit still for love nor money but if i stop and ask what i just said they can usually quote me word for word i've seen an exponential increase in attention deficit and vestibular issues but the really strange thing is they just don't seem curious maybe they are so bombarded with information they don't need to be where kids before would ask lots of questions want to know and find out things the 2017s just seemed like flatliners who could care less content knowledge has been watered down because they can just google it but they don't if i had had google at their age i would have been in heaven 2017's can literally find out anything in the world they want to know at the touch of a few buttons and they just can't be bothered or can't still long enough to do it there's one elementary teachers take

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Keywords: difference, teachers, 1997 and 2017 students, students today, today, students, reddit, askreddit, askreddit funny, top posts, top posts of r/, r/, r/askreddit, reddit top posts, reddit cringe, comedy, reddit compilation, top posts of all time, askreddit question, askreddit top posts, ask reddit, askreddit reading, subreddit, reddit stories, best of r/askreddit, funny reddit, best reddit posts, best of reddit, Updoot Reddit, TZ Reddit

Id: IMREvQWetAE

Length: 14min 23sec (863 seconds)

Published: Fri Jul 19 2019